Ottolenghi Simple | Gluten Free Rice Noodle Salad with Cucumber and Poppy Seed

So it’s the beginning of January and I’ve just taken down the Christmas tree. I couldn’t do it fast enough this year. Last night, after my toddler had gone to bed, I spontaneously decided Christmas needed to over. It was the beginning of 2019 and I just wanted a clean slate and that extra floor space in my living room. So ornaments were packed, tree dismantled and all those annoying pine needles swept up and tree tossed outside, ready to be put out on the curb for yard waste collection day.

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A delicious, vegetarian, rice noodle salad full of contrasting textures and flavors. A welcome respite after the holidays.

This rice noodle salad was something akin to getting rid of the holiday decor. Bright flavors, raw vegetables, no animal protein, gluten-free and punchy with the sharp acidity of apple cider vinegar and tart apples. Invariably, a clean slate meal for the digestive system and not wanting to feel stuffed after weeks of indulgent meals.

Where it all started.

I’ve been an Ottolenghi fan for quite awhile. My first encounter with his cookbooks happened when I was working for a “healthy food” concept restaurant. The owner of the restaurant had several of his books on her shelf in the office and we, the chefs and cooks, were welcome to peruse them for inspiration. I was completely transfixed upon glossing through those pages of Plenty and Jerusalem. 

The vibrancy, the textures, the gazillion ways he could prepare eggplant. Not to mention grains, pulses and fresh vegetables. Oh, but those very long lists of ingredients (some not very readily available) and the lengthy steps it took to prepare some recipes.

I usually am not very fazed by long laundry lists with cooking, especially when a lot of them are spices. I’m a chef. I have a lot of these ingredients in my pantry and sometimes certain techniques take a long word count to explain properly. I understand why, though, some people can be intimidated looking at his recipes.

Enter Ottolenghi Simple.

I was intrigued when I first heard he was putting out a collection of “simplified” recipes and pre-ordered the book on Amazon UK (you can log in with your US Amazon username and password). I like having recipes in metric, since this makes it so easy to scale recipes up or down and I think metric is a more accurate way to measure. Bonus: the UK design version of all of his books are visually more appealing to me with simple and colorful graphics of fruit, vegetables and meat. I wonder why he thought the North American version had to have food photography for the cover and at the beginning of each chapter? I’m sure focus groups are to blame for this.

He starts out by explaining that this is not a 30 minute meal type of cookbook. It’s full of recipes that are classified with many different ways a recipe can be “simple”. The word SIMPLE is used as an acronym and each recipe is stamped with a letter in that word. So “S” means short on time. “I” is 10 ingredients or less and “M” means make ahead. You get the picture. I thought it was a clever use of word play.

Flipping through the pages, all of the recipes seem to be very much in the usual style of his past cookbooks. Lots of herbs, tahini, lemon, raw and cooked vegetables with a little dairy, meat and seafood thrown into the mix. Most recipes have shorter ingredient lists and the number of steps seemed to be less, although I noticed that a lot of instruction happened in the ingredient list. It’s a little trick I’ve used before when developing recipes that needed to fit in a small amount of space.

So, instead of just stating 600 grams cavolo nero, it will look more like this: 600 grams cavolo nero, leaves pulled off stems, stems discarded, leaves roughly chopped and rinsed. By writing it this way, you can leave out instructing the reader how to prep the cavolo nero. Despite this, I think this book is full of very approachable, classic Ottolenghi flavors and cooking techniques. The fact that you can get so much flavor and “wow factor” from a seemingly simple list of ingredients is what has always impressed me with Ottolenghi recipes.

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